Strange Little Girl
by Shaded Mazoku
Summary: FFVI - Terra is a very strange little girl.


**Title:** Strange Little Girl.

**Author:** Shaded Mazoku.

**Part:** 1/1.

**Disclaimer:** FFVI and the characters belong to Square Enix. sI'm not convinced that I don't belong to Kefka, though.../s

**Warnings: **Child neglect and manipulation.

**Rating:** PG.

**Summary:** Terra is a very strange little girl.

**Pairing(s): **None, gen.

**Fandom:** Final Fantasy VI.

**Words:** 914.

**Notes: **Originally written for FF_love on LJ's "innocent" prompt, and then I lost my internet for weeks and missed the deadline.

*

Such a strange little girl, Terra was. Though there wasn't a lot of children living in the Palace or the surrounding grounds, only a few children of the palace servants. The nobles didn't bring their children to the Palace until they were old enough to be considered responsible for their own actions. But even with such a small base for comparison, there was no denying that there was something definitely strange about Terra.

Maybe it was how, when you considered everything, Terra just didn't seem at home in the world. She was an ephemeral-seeming little waif, wide-eyed and fragile, her green hair making it impossible to take her for a normal human being. She seemed so very out of place in the harsh, mechanical world of Vector, surrounded by steel and stone in a world based on science, not the magical and spiritual energies of the world that should have been Terra's home.

When people looked at Terra, they saw that, a being not of their world, and not like them, and to hide their feelings of unease, they treated her accordingly. Their cold, stilted treatment, treating her as though she was little more than a very life-like ornament or avoiding her if at all possible, caused Terra great pain. Not just because of the treatment, but because she had no idea what she'd done wrong to deserve this kind of treatment. She was a quiet, complying child, and did nothing to deserve being shunned. But people feared what they did not understand, and they didn't understand Terra. To them, she was too strange and too foreign, and though their treatment of her was highly unfair, they didn't really know any other way to treat her.

Terra was an intelligent child, too intelligent for her young age, but it was a theoretical kind of intelligence. She knew the names for every component of a Magitek Armour, and for several scientific processes. She knew too much, and too little. Though she was a brilliant little girl, she knew nothing about emotions and socialization. There had never been a reason for her to learn to be a real person.

She was raised an experiment in the vast Magitek facilities, a her responses carefully catalogued, her reactions to their tests were written down and studied. She was an unique opportunity to them, not a child. Not a real person. She knew the feeling of flames coursing through her, the cold grip of ice in her blood. Magic was her birthright. But she had never seen animals that weren't in a specimen tank, or smelled the scent of flowers. She'd never seen a chocobo, or heard a bedtime story.

As long as she was who she was, the result of an union that should have been impossible, with her father's blood coursing through her veins, marking her as something else, she'd always be isolated. Because there was no denying she was something other than human, her chances of being accepted were next to none.

And such a strange little girl that isolation had made Terra, isolated from a world she barely knew existed by a heritage she had never asked for. Her parents had committed the crime, but Terra was the one serving the sentence. Lost in the steel-and-machine world of Vector, her loneliness cried out loud enough that it should have been deafening, yet everyone chose to ignore her. With the knowledge that she was too strange integrated in her very being, she was all innocence and lingering sadness, too naïve to tell the difference between genuine emotion and sugar-coated lies.

From his perch, watching the small girl in the palace garden, a pretty name for brown grass and a pond sickly green with algae, a half-dead briar bush barely holding on to a handful of leaves, a man smiled lazily to himself, too wide and too red lips giving an impression of danger. Terra looked so very alone, yearning for company even though she honestly believed that she was too strange, too wrong, to deserve that company.

Kefka was stranger still, though, and unlike her, he delighted in that strangeness. And because he was avoided as much, and even more, than Terra was, he had all the time he'd ever need. Time enough to sit next to a small, lost child on a stone bench in a withered garden, talking softly and inwardly delighting in the extreme gratefulness in her eyes. Too excited to finally have someone willing to talk to her, Terra never even suspected that his words were pretty lies.

Smiling as he talked, Kefka watched Terra grasping every shred of attention he was willing to give her as though it was something incredibly precious. She was truly an innocent creature, so easy to manipulate. Strange as they both were, nobody would dare interfere, or even care enough to try. Terra would be his. His to build up to whatever he wanted and then tear back apart and reform, as often as he saw fit.

With her as his weapon, dancing on strings he had fashioned for his strange little doll, he would watch the world in flames and agony. The world had given him Terra, by isolating her from everything until she was starved for attention, and Kefka saw the irony in that.

Because the world had given him Terra, and strange and damaged as it had left her, she would soon give him the world.


End file.
